Sunday, January 21, 2018

Massachusetts Legislature must reject assisted suicide.

Alex SchadenbergExecutive Director - Euthanasia Prevention Coalition

John Kelly, Second Thoughts Massachusetts

John Kelly, the director of the disability rights group Second Thoughts Massachusetts, wrote an excellent article on why the Massachusetts legislature must say NO to assisted suicide, that was published in the Boston Globe on January 16. In his article, Kelly states that Massachusetts Joint Committee on Public Health, which have defeated seven previous assisted suicide bills, will be debating two identical assisted suicide bills (H.1194 and S.1225). Kelly explains that assisted suicide is simply too dangerous.

Kelly then offers several examples of why assisted suicide is too dangerous. The first is that it is cheaper than treatment:

The bill, despite its promise of “end-of-life options,” ultimately takes choice away from people. Because assisted suicide would immediately become the cheapest “treatment” offered, it would encourage insurers to reject traditionally covered treatments. That’s already happening in states where assisted suicide is legal.

Dr. Brian Callister, a Nevada physician, reported earlier this year that two patients were denied routine treatments with 70 percent cure rates by their respective California and Oregon insurance companies, which offered coverage for assisted suicide instead. And again, once assisted suicide became legal in California,Stephanie Packer, a young mother with scleroderma, was denied her prescribed treatment but learned that her assisted suicide copay would be $1.20.

The second reason Kelly offers is that misdiagnosis is common:

To qualify for assisted suicide under the proposed statute, you need to have a prognosis of six months or less to live. Every year, however, doctors misjudge the time a person has left, and thousands “graduate” from their six-month “terminal illness” hospice benefit. People outlive terminal expectations all the time, like the late Senator Ted Kennedy, who lived a full year longer than his terminal diagnosis of 2 to 4 months. In 2012, Kennedy’s widow, Victoria, wrote that the additional months he lived were meaningful and productive, and left behind priceless memories.

The third reason is that the legislation is flawed:

The bill requires no official witness at the death, creating opportunities for foul play. Especially vulnerable will be the 10 percent of Massachusetts adults over the age of 60 estimated to be abused every year, almost always by family members. A caregiver or heir to an estate can witness a person’s request, pick up the prescription, and then administer the lethal dose without worry of investigation — the bill immunizes everyone involved.

Among the bills’ hollow “safeguards” is a provision requiring people who request assisted suicide to have a one-time counseling appointment to determine that the person “is capable and not suffering from a psychiatric or psychological disorder or depression causing impaired judgment.” But impairing judgment is what depression does, and few psychologists are confident they can diagnose depression in a single visit. People in the midst of a severe depression can usually present as “unimpaired,” especially in a single meeting with a counselor they’ve never met before, who is not even required to be a psychologist or psychiatrist. Depression is treatable and reversible. Suicide isn’t.

The final reason that Kelly offers is that assisted suicide changes the healthcare system:

Finally, assisted suicide sets up a two-tier system, in which “quality of life” judgments by others steer some people to suicide prevention services and others toward death. Disabled people, including people disabled by their serious illness, are especially vulnerable. A recent study in the New England Journal of Medicine described the main motive for assisted suicide requests as “existential distress.” The official reports from Oregon and Washington show that the top five reasons to request assisted suicide do not even include pain, but rather distress over dependence on others, loss of abilities, bodily shame, incontinence, and feeling like a burden.

People with disabilities generally oppose assisted suicide because it threatens their equality rights:

We disabled people reject the idea that the dependent aspects of our daily lives make our lives undignified.

Opposition to assisted suicide is centered in communities of color and the working class. Black and Latino voters, opposed to assisted suicide by more than 2-to-1, effectively defeated assisted-suicide ballot Question 2 in 2012. People historically disrespected and neglected by our health care system are rightly suspicious of the power to prescribe death.